The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The basic premise of the Internet of things (“IoT”) is that a variety of objects or things, such as sensors, actuators, location-based systems, and identification technologies such as, but not limited to, radio-frequency identification (RFID), may interact with each other using machine-to-machine communications, and may act in a cooperative fashion to achieve a common goal. An example goal might be a number of air quality sensors gathering information about air quality in a geographically dispersed location. A further example is a series of piezo-electric vibration sensors monitoring equipment performance or monitoring home security. In this regard each sensing device could be considered an IoT device, and the cooperation of many devices working together could be considered an IoT service.
Conventional IoT techniques are sometimes subject to one or more of the following deficiencies:                1. IoT devices are typically single function devices which are programmed for a particular function. Reconfiguration of the device may demand manual intervention and downtime. Thus there may be large barriers for repurposing, and such devices cannot be readily reconfigured to support a different IOT service than that for which they were originally commissioned. Further these single purpose devices may not be configured to run multiple applications preventing participation in multiple IOT services.        2. Inability for devices to self-discover and auto-provision themselves. Typical devices may require end user intervention, and manual configuration with advanced domain and programming knowledge being required. This problem is more pronounced when dealing with large volumes of devices and post-deployment.        3. Inflexible reconfiguration capability: Many IoT compute devices are preconfigured and have little or no capabilities for reconfiguration. This may present significant challenge when devices are in inaccessible locations or are embedded or when devices require direct physical intervention for reconfiguration. Devices may not be able to run multiple computing workloads.        4. There may be significant costs (both operational costs and capital costs) associated with deployment of IOT services.        5. Current IOT offerings may not provide on-demand device and network performance metrics. Such metrics may be needed to provision resource-aware services such as community-grid optimization services.        6. Divergent network topologies may be difficult to interconnect. As an example combination of two network topologies, one that is low latency, high frequency and one that is high latency, bursty data may be difficult.        7. Typical computing workloads may be processed on cloud-centric infrastructures. This may present a number of potential issues such as: (i) excessive latency, which can prohibit (near) real-time services delivery such as home automation and healthcare alerting; (ii) centralized compute processing acting as a single point of failure in the event of loss of WAN connectivity; (iii) prohibitive cost of data transmission for machine-to-machine type data transmission; and (iv) the sending of all data, irrespective of its value, for processing in the cloud.        8. Cloud centric approaches often raise privacy, security and authentication issues. Users may not be afforded the ability to determine which data they wish to share; this may be especially concerning for residential or high-value industrial users.        9. Current offerings may not provide on-demand device and network performance metrics. Such metrics may be needed in the provisioning of resource-aware services such as community-grid optimization services.        